Events often happen that cannot be explained. Sometimes these events involve two seemingly unrelated occurrences that coincide in a spooky way with no logical explanation. Some believe-it-or-not coincidences include:
Robert Fallon
Long before online poker made poker-playing a safe pastime, rough characters played poker in groups, often with unsavory opponents. Robert Fallon was shot dead in 1858 after his poker playing partners accused him of winning the $600 pot through cheating.
Since none of the other players were willing to take the now-unlucky $600 and since Fallon’s seat was empty, the remaining players found a stranger who was prepared to take Fallon’s place. The old players staked the replacement player with Fallon’s $600.
The new player succeeded in turning the $600 stake into $2,200 but when the police arrived to investigate Robert Fallon’s killing, they demanded the original $600 be passed on to Fallon’s next of kin. Only….it turned out that the new player was Fallon’s son! He had not seen his father in seven years, but took his place at the poker table and quadrupled his inheritance.
Titanic
The Titanic was billed as “unsinkable” but when it hit a large iceberg in 1912, on its maiden voyage, it sank. However, 14 years before that event Morgan Robertson wrote a book called “Futility.” He wrote about a book called The Titan which was supposed to be unsinkable. In Robertson’s book, The Titan hit an iceberg and sank. Like the Titanic, The Titan sank in the North Atlantic in April and most of the passengers drown because there weren’t enough lifeboats everyone.
King Louis XVI
King Louis XVI of France was always nervous when the 21st of any month came around. When he was young, he was warned to beware of the 21st day of the month by an astrologer. After the French Revolution on June 21st, 1791, King Louis and his queen Marie Antoinette were arrested while trying to escape France. On September 21st, 1791, France decided to become a republic and get rid of their royalty. On January 21st, 1793 King Louis XVI was beheaded.
Edger Allen Poe
Edger Allen Poe wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his only full-length novel, in 1838. The storyline revolves around Arthur Pym who stows away on a whaling ship. The crew mutinies and everyone who doesn’t die is left adrift after a storm. They draw straws to see who’s going to get eaten. Richard Parker, a mutineer, draws the short straw and is killed and eaten. Shortly thereafter, the remaining crew are rescued.
In 1884, the Mignonette was sailing from England to Australia. The ship was battered by storms off the coast of Africa and four men were left adrift in a dinghy with no food or water. They decided one person would need to die so that the rest might life. Three of the people in the dingy decided to kill and eat the fourth. His name? Richard Parker.
Tamerlane
Tamerlane was a warlord in Asia in the 14th century. He conquered much of Asia and in doing so caused the deaths of close to 17 million people. Five centuries later Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, ordered the tomb of Tamerlane to be opened. When the archaeologists opened the tomb they found an inscription inside. It read “Whoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.”
Hours after Stalin opened Tamerlane’s tomb the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Three years later, in 1942, Stalin ordered that Tamerlane’s remains be put back into the tomb with full burial rights. Soon afterward the German army surrendered at Stalingrad, signaling the beginning of the end for the German invaders.
D-Day
Leonard Dawe was the headmaster of the Strand School in Surrey. He liked crosswords and wrote them for The Telegraph – a job that he’d held since The Telegraph started running crosswords in 1925. In June 1944 he was arrested by MI5 (the British Secret Service) which discovered, by accidence, that many of the words that Dawe was putting into his crosswords were code words for various part of the D-Day plan. Innocently, Dawe had included like “Utah,” “Mulberry,” “Overlord,” “Juno,” “Omaha” and “Neptune.”
Dawe had written his crosswords by giving his students blank layouts and asking them to fill in the words. These students had been hanging out with some soldiers stationed nearby. They had overheard codewords and put them into Dawe’s crossword.
Rosie Davies
Rosie Davies was given up for adoption when she was just three months old. She was adopted by a loving family but always yearned to know more about her biological family. As an adult she learned that she had three biological brothers. She found two of them easily but for years she searched for the third brother, Chris. Eventually she discovered that Chris lived across the street from her and had been looking for her for many years as well.
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy
The parallels between the lives of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy have been analyzed many times but the coincidences are so striking that they bear repeating. The two men were elected to Congress 100 years apart (Lincoln in 1846 and Kennedy in 1946) and were elected to the presidency 100 years apart (1860 and 1960). Both were assassinated by Southerners – shot in the head on a Friday. After their assassinations, both men were succeeded by Johnsons — Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson took Kennedy’s place.
Robert Todd Lincoln
Robert Todd Lincoln was President Lincoln’s oldest son. He was a figure at three presidential assassinations.
Todd Lincoln was supposed to be at Ford’s Theater the night his father was assassinated but decided to go to bed early instead. He was at his father’s side when he died the next morning.
Todd Lincoln accepted a position as Secretary of War for President James Garfield in 1881. Garfield was shot soon after the appointment at the Baltimore and Potomac train station in Washington DC and at the time, Lincoln was walking about 40 feet behind the President. Garfield died 80 days later.
Todd Lincoln gave up political service and went to work at the Pullman Palace Car Company as president. In 1901, he and his family traveled to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York. As soon as he got off the train he was handed a telegram: President William McKinley had just been shot at the very same Buffalo Exposition.
Stay Home
One couple has learned that the best vacations can be those that you do at home. Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence were vacationing in New York City on September 11, 2001 and were caught up in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center.
Their next vacation was in London and they wre in the city on July 7 2005 when suicide bombers attacked the London Underground.
In 2008 they decided to give it another try and traveled to Mumbai and became caught up in the Colaba terror attack that paralyzed the city.